My gas tank finally got down to “E” yesterday. It’s been more than a month since I filled the tank. How time flies, when you’re ‘sheltering at home’.
And my goodness, how cheap the gasoline was! $22 for a fill-up (using my City Market shopper’s discount.) I haven’t filled my tank for such a low dollar amount since the Y2K disaster that never happened.
The COVID disaster, meanwhile, has obviously happened, judging by the number of people wearing facemasks and obeying the “one way” shopping aisles at City Market.
A friend sent me a YouTube link the other day, to a fascinating interview with a medical doctor who has unusual opinions about the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Seems to be a lot of them around, lately: medical doctors with opinions. Opinions about whether we’re doing enough testing; opinions about whether the data is accurate; opinions about hydroxychloroquine and remdesivir; opinions about damage to the economy.
But this particular interview headed off into the Twilight Zone.
I was too young, in the early 1960s, to have any memory of the original Twilight Zone TV series — but I did enjoy the “revival” of the series that ran on CBS in the mid-1980s.
It seems to me few of the shows were as weird as what’s going on today, in 2020, with this whole pandemic thing.
One of the more unusual perspectives on the COVID issue was shared in interview with Dr. Zach Bush in conversation with noted vaccine skeptic Charlene Bollinger:
The Truth Behind the COVID-19 Curtain, Backed by Science & Biology 101, with Dr. Zach Bush.
You can view the entire 40-minute interview here (unless YouTube has blocked it?)
Daily Post editor Bill Hudson is himself something of a vaccine skeptic, so I’m going to tread very lightly on that topic. (Website editors… you have to be careful around them. They have big egos.) But what I found most fascinating about Dr. Bush’s presentation wasn’t related to vaccines; it was his perspective on viruses in general. It gets a bit technical… I never took biology in college, not even Biology 101… and if I totally screw it up, well… you can watch the video for yourself.
Interviewer Charlene Bollinger begins by asking the doctor, “What is COVID-19?”
Here’s Dr. Bush:
“Viruses are very simple genetic information updates that are put out by Nature into the environment all the time. There’s not a second goes by when when not seeing millions of variants of new viruses that are being produced by Nature. They can be produced by bacteria, fungi, human cells, any animal you can think of, as well as any bacteria or fungi you can think of, is producing this genetic, transportive information all the time.”
That’s a pretty challenging idea, right there, and we’re only a few minutes into the video. Viruses are genetic information, produced by Mother Nature using any bacteria or fungi you can think of. (Right at this moment, I am finding it difficult to think of any particular bacteria or fungi, but let’s continue.)
“Viruses are not actually germs… like, the germ theory that we have around bacteria is very different in its function, because bacteria are actually living things. Viruses are just little pockets of genetic information that were really developed at the beginning of biology on the planet. They were really the first steps in biology beginning to function within diverse ecosystems, and they have been the method for adaptation on the planet since the very beginning of biology.
“We have made a mistake by taking our understanding of bacteria and fungi and parasites and living organisms… and then applying them to viruses as if they were some sort of living organism capable of attack on our bodies. In fact, they are not capable of doing much of anything other than providing genetic information to the environment.”
So at this point, I am scratching my head, because much of Dr. Bush is saying about viruses — that they simple pieces of genetic information and are not really living organisms — aligns pretty well with what you can find on certain biology websites. Like, say, biologydictionary.com:
A virus is a chain of nucleic acids (DNA or RNA) which lives in a host cell, uses parts of the cellular machinery to reproduce, and releases the replicated nucleic acid chains to infect more cells. A virus is often housed in a protein coat or protein envelope, a protective covering which allows the virus to survive between hosts.
A virus can take on a variety of different structures. The smallest virus is only 17 nanometers, barely longer than an average sized protein… However, these are not cells. Inside of the protein coat is a carefully folded RNA molecule, which contains the information necessary to replicate the protein coat, the RNA molecule, and the components necessary to hijack a cell’s natural processes to complete these tasks.
Dr. Bush is careful, however, not to use words like “infect” and “hijack” because he’s suggesting that viruses are one of the tools Mother Nature uses to spread new genetic information among a certain species. And God knows, we humans are short of information at this moment. We don’t even know which tests are accurate, or which pharmaceutical drug we ought to be injecting or swallowing, or when our favorite bar will finally be able to open.
We are, however, learning how to be stuck at home with the wife and kids, 24/7 — which is something new for most of us.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus, in Dr. Bush’s theory, is an important genetic information update that humankind desperately needs in 2020, and Mother Nature has found a way to deliver that information to a fair number of us. About 5.7 million of us around the globe have been blessed with the update thus far, if you’re counting only the people who’ve been tested. The number who’ve received the update, but never noticed, is probably at least double that number. Maybe ten times that number.
Unfortunately, the update caused the operating system to crash, fatally, in about 360,000 cases so far. Especially, the older units are prone to crash.
But nobody ever claimed Mother Nature was perfect.
You can view the entire 40-minute interview here.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.